THE ALTERNATIVE TO PRIVATIZATION

Looking forward into the past: Lessons for the future of Medicare on its 60th anniversary

Former Saskatchewan Premier and national New Democratic Party leader T.C. (Tommy) Douglas in 1965. Douglas was instrumental in the creation of Medicare. The Canadian Press

THE CONVERSATION
Published: December 21, 2022 

It is the 60th anniversary of Medicare, but no one seems to care.

It is, after all, hard to be enthusiastic about a system in crisis. Patients can’t find doctors (almost one in five Canadian adults). Those who have doctors have a hard time getting in to see them (only 18 per cent can get an appointment within a day or two).

Doctors are burned out, leaving their practices with no one to replace them. New physicians want to focus on patient care, not the business of health care.

This is, of course, just the beginning of the problem. The premiers want more money from Ottawa and Ottawa wants more data from the provinces. Alberta is making health proposals that some say are a short step away from privatized health care, and the recent meeting between federal and provincial health ministers ended in a stalemate.

The dawn of Medicare 

B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix, right, is flanked by his provincial and territorial counterparts as he responds to questions at a news conference without federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos after the second of two days of meetings, in Vancouver on Nov. 8. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

These seem like intractable problems. But our research suggests part of the solution might be found back in 1962, when the model that would grow into our current health-care system was launched in Saskatchewan, spreading to other provinces over the next few years.

At the dawn of Medicare, the proposed new model resulted in a strike by Saskatchewan doctors worried about “socialized medicine.”

Faced with the prospect of losing access to their doctors, almost 15,000 families (representing 50,000 people) formed 34 community clinic associations, raising over $325,000 (almost $3 million today) over less than a year for health-care clinics that patients would own and govern based on democratic co-operative principles.

The clinics adopted a philosophy of care that rejected many of the tenets of conventional medicine, which Stan Rands, a clinic organizer, described as focused on “physiological and biochemical causes of disease” and dependence on “equipment and tests for the diagnosis and treatment of illness.” The result, he argued, was that it was “ill-equipped to deal with the human and social manifestations of illness or disease.”

The community co-operative clinic model

Based on this philosophy, the clinics implemented what were, at the time, radical measures. Instead of being paid on a fee-for-service basis, doctors were paid salaries. Instead of sole practitioner businesses, doctors worked as part of a team deeply engaged and responsive to their communities because the clinics were run by patients. Instead of treating symptoms, the team treated patients holistically, probing the physical and social factors that we now know lead to illness.

Although the clinics strengthened the government’s hand in reaching a settlement with the striking doctors, the province never embraced the co-operative clinic model. Instead, the clinics would spend years struggling to be understood by policymakers who tended to favour a conventional system based on fee-for-service, doctor-led Medicare.

Community co-op clinics are run by patients instead of sole practitioners. Doctors work as part of a team deeply engaged and responsive to their communities. (Shutterstock)

Many clinics folded shortly after Medicare was introduced; today, only four remain, with large clinics in Saskatoon, Regina and Prince Albert, and one smaller rural clinic operating in Wynyard. Even the 2002 Commission on the Future of Health Care in Canada, led by former NDP premier of Saskatchewan Roy Romanow, ignored the sector’s efforts to put its model on the agenda.

Away from the spotlight, the remaining co-operative clinics went about living their philosophy. They hired social workers, offered mental health services, brought in physiotherapists, set up pharmacies, offered in-house minor surgeries, performed house calls, operated forerunners to modern-day telehealth, and set up shop in disadvantaged, poorly served communities like Saskatoon’s west side.

The future of co-op clinics

Meanwhile, there are signs that the philosophy of team-based, patient-focused, community-based care may be gaining ground. In 2017, for example, Ontario’s Matawa First Nation opened the country’s first Indigenous-run co-operative clinic.

The provincial government in Ontario operates a large network of not-for-profit community clinics similar in structure to Saskatchewan’s clinics but lacking explicit democratic co-operative control. In addition, some Canadian doctors are now advocating for a different model.

Read more: The doctor won't see you now: Why access to care is in critical condition

Elsewhere, there are indications that citizens may be tired of waiting for policymakers to act. As the Globe and Mail recently reported, residents of the Saanich Peninsula, on the southeast coast of Vancouver Island, raised money to open two medical clinics and recruit doctors who could take over from physicians at, or near, retirement. As Dale Henley, the co-chair of the non-profit that owns and operates the clinics told the Globe and Mail,

“I think we’ve got to do a little more ourselves. We can’t just keep looking at governments all the time, because they’re not that good at it.”

As we look back on 60 years of Medicare and contemplate its many challenges, it may be time for communities to heed Henley’s call and once again voice their desire in words and action for access to the kind of holistic care pioneered by the co-operative clinics. Maybe this time, policymakers will listen.

Authors

1. Marc-Andre Pigeon

   Assistant Professor, Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Saskatchewan

2. Haizhen Mou

   Professor, Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Saskatchewan

3. Natalie Kallio

   Professional Research Associate, Canadian Centre for the Study of Co-operatives, University of Saskatchewan

Disclosure statement

Marc-Andre Pigeon is the director of the Canadian Centre for the Study of Co-operatives. It receives funding from the co-operative and credit union sector. The research into the co-operative clinics is funded, in part, by the Saskatoon Community Clinic, one of the clinics being investigated in this research.

Natalie Kallio is a Professional Research Associate at the Canadian Centre for the Study of Co-operatives, which receives funding from the co-operative and credit union sector. This research is funded, in part, by the Saskatoon Community Clinic, one of the clinics being studied.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Socialized Medicine Began In Alberta 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PROLETARIAN DOCTORS 

To attain global climate and biodiversity goals, we must reclaim nature in our cities


Conserving nature in cities can help protect the biodiversity within them. (Unsplash)

THE CONVERSATION
Published: December 21, 2022

The climate and biodiversity crises we have been experiencing for the past few decades are inseparable. The scientific research presented at the back-to-back international summits on climate and biodiversity held in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt and in Montréal, Canada, respectively, has made this abundantly clear.

Addressing these crises requires real transformative action and commitments — including plans that call for the conservation of 30 per cent of global land and sea areas within the decade — have been made to halt biodiversity loss by 2030. But where do we start implementing these targets?

At the 7th Summit for Subnational Governments and Cities, an official parallel event to the COP15 biodiversity conference, cities were brought to the forefront of conversations on how to protect life on Earth.

As a researcher of terrestrial ecosystems, I believe that we cannot think of nature as something set aside in wildernesses, far from human activity. We need to conserve some elements of nature everywhere, including in the cities we live in.

Read more: COP15's Global Biodiversity Framework must advance Indigenous-led conservation to halt biodiversity loss by 2030

Cities need nature

Cities are growing rapidly and covering more and more land. They are often built on the most fertile land, near rivers or coastlines. This is also where most of the biodiversity lives. It is, therefore, crucial to conserve nature in cities.

Healthy soils and wetlands absorb rainwater and snowmelt to buffer floods.

 (AP Photo/Bruce Smith)

To add to this, some ecosystem services that humans rely on only operate within short geographical limits. Healthy soils and wetlands absorb rainwater and snowmelt to buffer floods, while trees filter pollutants from the air and alleviate heat waves. All these services are most effective when nature is close to where people live, making it crucial for cities to preserve their nature.

In Canada, the richest ecosystems and the highest numbers of species are found in the south, and this is also where most of the cities and farms are, leaving little land available for wilderness.

To protect healthy population sizes of species native to this region, we need to preserve green spaces in cities. Research has shown that small protected areas can have disproportionately large effects in protecting biodiversity.

Contact with nature also brings tremendous physical and mental health benefits as seen during the pandemic when spending time outdoors became very valuable to people suffering from stress and isolation.

Equitable distribution of natural areas around a city is also important. Public green spaces can be especially valuable to people who do not own country cottages or backyards.

Montréal leads the way

Montréal, the host city of the COP15 biodiversity conference, is a perfect case in point for how cities are both succeeding at and struggling with conserving nature.

The City of Montréal committed to protecting 10 per cent of its territory in November 2022. This commitment was reaffirmed at COP15, along with the launch of the Montréal Pledge, which called on cities around the world to protect biodiversity on their territories and provided practical steps on how to do so. So far, 47 cities from all five continents have committed to the pledge.

The Falaise St-Jacques green space boasts of 83 species of birds including some threatened species.

Meeting this target includes the creation of new parks like Montréal’s Falaise St-Jacques escarpment and Champ des Possibles.

The Falaise St-Jacques, long used as a dumping ground by businesses nearby was revitalized by a community group. They organized clean-ups, removed hundreds of tires and other debris, built trails and transformed the site into an urban oasis enjoyed by local residents, human, feathered and furry. Home to 83 bird species, including two species at risk, the Chimney Swift and the Wood Thrush, Falaise St-Jacques has become an important habitat for migratory birds.

The Champ des Possibles — a railway triage site turned industrial wasteland — was saved by a group of local residents, who planted gardens, installed beehives and held concerts, creating a de-facto park that is now co-managed by the community organization and the city. This area now boasts of a wealth of biodiversity too.

However, the island of Montréal continues to include many other unprotected green spaces, including the Technoparc and Parc-Nature Mercier Hochelaga Maisonneuve, which are threatened by industrial expansion.

The Technoparc attracts thousands of nature enthusiasts and bird watchers. 

(Technoparc Oiseaux), Author provided

The Technoparc, which comprises a mature forest, marshes and meadows and is a birding hotspot in Montréal (216 birds including 14 species-at-risk), is attracting thousands of nature enthusiasts to document the ecological value of the site, to tag endangered Monarch butterflies and to chart the cooling effects of the meadows and forests in the surrounding industrial heat island.

Despite numerous pressures exerted on the space, efforts like citizen-science documentation, gained notably through iNaturalist observations and City Nature Challenge bioblitzes, have succeeded in dissuading developers from moving into the site so far.

Politicians at all levels of government — from the municipal to the provincial to the federal — have now started to call for the site’s protection.

Researchers here have also mapped remaining green spaces around the island of Montréal and calculated the ecosystem services they can provide to help communities better plan for the future.
Community efforts can go a long way

Researchers and students at Concordia University have been working with community organizations to study and educate about biodiversity in these spaces.

We use citizen-science tools like iNaturalist.ca to welcome people from all walks of life to the community of biodiversity scientists, help them identify the fauna and flora around them and share the collected data with scientists around the world.

Community members identify trees in an urban forest at an event organized by Concordia University in Montréal. (Emma Despland), Author provided

Building a relationship with nature around us can help foster human engagement with the natural world and a desire to learn more and to protect, restore and steward the living ecosystems around us.

At the COP27 climate summit in Egypt last month, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for “all hands on deck” to address the climate and biodiversity crises. He said, “Making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21st century. It must be the top, top priority for everyone, everywhere”.

What better place to start than in a park or green space near our homes?

Author

Emma Despland
Professor, Biology Department, Concordia University

In Danielle Smith’s fantasy Alberta, Indigenous struggle is twisted to suit settlers

THE CONVERSATION
Published: December 19, 2022 

What do a notorious Ku Klux Klan writer, right-wing libertarianism, the Cherokee Trail of Tears and the “lost cause” of the American Confederacy have to do with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s recent controversial statements on Indigenous matters?

More than we might imagine.

Smith was recently forced to backpedal on comments conflating the ugly history of the Indian Act with Alberta’s treatment by Ottawa.

Just a month earlier, her office had to publicly address her solidly debunked claims of distant Cherokee heritage. She also compared the deadly ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee Trail of Tears with Alberta’s anti-Ottawa conflict as though they shared a similar moral significance.

These incidents are more than exasperating examples of studied ignorance or false equivalency. Smith’s grasp on Indigenous issues is untethered from actual history. It seems rooted not in genuine allyship and justice but in the appropriation of Indigenous experiences to advance white grievance politics in Alberta and beyond.

Justifying false fantasies

Right-wing white extremists have long tried to hijack Indigenous rights struggles to justify their own fantasies of being oppressed by overreaching globalist governments and displaced by people of colour.

These attempts graft cleanly onto more popular frontier mythology about the “conquest” of North America, the “savages” who vanish into the sunset and the heroic white settlers, voyageurs, and pioneers who wrested modern Canada from the unspoiled wilderness.

In this self-justifying settler fantasy, Indigenous people become historical symbols of a false past of inevitable disappearance, not the vibrant cultural and political Nations still here today. When reduced entirely to the symbolic — and thus disconnected from actual Indigenous lives and realities — these stereotypes can be put to dangerous ideological uses.

Assembly of First Nations National Chief RoseAnne Archibald says she supports treaty chiefs who are opposing Danielle Smith’s proposed Alberta Sovereignty Act.

 (Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press)

Rewriting Cherokee history

By way of illustration, look to a once bestselling book, The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter.

First published in 1976, the book was initially presented as the charming autobiographical reflection of a mixed-race orphan raised by his wise Cherokee grandparents in the Tennessee mountains during the 1920s.

Yet Little Tree, his grandparents and family friend Willow John are seemingly the only Indigenous people in the whole of the southeastern United States. There’s no mention of the Eastern Band of Cherokees in North Carolina or other Nations in the east, and the Cherokees forced west on the Trail of Tears are referenced only as a pitiful remnant of a nobler past.

The main antagonists in the book aren’t the local whites and their descendants who profited the most from the policy of Indian Removal, but rather the faraway but intrusive “guv’mint” and its hated northern politicians.

Read more: Cherokee Nation wants to send a delegate to the House – it's an idea older than Congress itself

Carter misrepresents history to highlight the violent overreach of the government and arrogant city folk whose economic and social interests it represents. He repeatedly frames white Confederates and their descendants as being equally sympathetic and unfairly oppressed as Little Tree’s Cherokee family and ancestors.

In Little Tree, both white Confederates and Cherokees seek to protect their mutual mountain home from intruders, government agents and cynical politicians. The anger of white Confederate sympathizers and the anguish of dispossessed Cherokees become one, and their identities are wholly united by a single common enemy: guv'mint.

In so doing, Carter ignores the fact that the Cherokee Nation itself was violently divided by the Civil War and that many Cherokees supported the Union or neutrality over alliance with the Confederacy.

He also erases the inconvenient reality that it was the South’s white citizens, not the federal government, who most enthusiastically supported the Indian Removal Act and who benefited the most when Cherokees and other Indigenous nations were driven from the region.

Cars travel along an Illinois highway on the Trail of Tears Auto Tour Route. Cherokee were forced westward to Oklahoma along the infamous trail, where many died and are buried. 

(AP Photo/James A. Finley)

Insidious rhetoric

As might already be expected, Forrest Carter was neither Little Tree nor Cherokee. His real name was Asa Earl Carter, a violent segregationist, white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan leader who wrote the notorious 1963 “segregation now, segregation forever” speech for Alabama Gov. George Wallace.

In the 1970s, he refashioned himself as “Forrest,” a genial, half-Cherokee fiction writer with a big moustache and folksy southern charm. Although he was more subtly libertarian in his fiction, his commitment to anti-Blackness and pro-Confederacy propaganda never wavered.

There’s nothing remotely Cherokee about the novel, but Carter was a masterful storyteller who exploited entrenched white stereotypes to lasting effect. Even though his true identity became widely known in 1991, The Education of Little Tree remains in print today.

It’s no great imaginative leap to see how Carter and Smith draw on similar ideas that, for all their differences, lead them in similar directions.

Smith, too, has cited mythical Cherokee heritage as a reason for her distrust of government. She too has misrepresented Cherokee history to conflate the Trail of Tears and its thousands of deaths with Alberta outrage against an increasingly intrusive federal government. She too has tried to link the horrors of Indigenous genocide with entitled grievance narratives long tied to far-right white nationalism.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in November. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson

This doesn’t mean that Smith has read Carter’s book, knows his story or supports the Confederacy or white nationalism. She may be sincerely invested in her unsubstantiated family story and her belief that Alberta and Indigenous Nations share the same struggles and the same singular oppressor in Ottawa.

The appropriation of Indigenous struggles has a long history in libertarian circles on both the left and right.

The rhetoric that informed Carter’s work and energizes white resentment in the United States and Canada is an unmistakable undercurrent in Smith’s own political vision. Regardless of stated intent, both distort and weaponize Cherokee history to ugly ends.

Smith’s heritage claims are core to this problem. She’s invoked her supposed Cherokee ancestor and the Trail of Tears on multiple occasions to link Indigenous oppression with her Alberta-first libertarianism.



She draws on this dodgy connection to assert insight and shared struggle while pushing a provincial sovereignty bill that’s on a direct collision course with First Nations’ treaty rights.

Dangerous by design

The disconnect is inevitable. And as this year’s so-called freedom convoy protests demonstrated, language around Indigenous rights is increasingly being appropriated by the same people who are quick to condemn Indigenous land and water protectors.

Read more: What every Canadian should remember about the 'freedom convoy' crisis

It’s happening elsewhere in Canada, too. Some of the more controversial “eastern Métis” groups in Canada were founded by explicitly anti-Indigenous white people who now use bogus Indigenous heritage claims to access the treaty rights they long railed against.

In Carter’s fantasy Appalachia — as in Smith’s fantasy Alberta — centuries of righteous Indigenous struggle are twisted into self-serving settler stereotypes that ignore actual Indigenous history, kinship and basic reality.

Reactionary white populism is hostile to Indigenous rights by design, as it’s ultimately about unilateral settler control of land and resources. But this remains unspoken in these circles. To speak of it would be to firmly dispel the false but convenient illusion of common struggle.

Whether intentional or not, Smith’s rhetoric is fundamentally anti-Indigenous. She’s distorting Indigenous histories and issues to dangerous ends and Canadians would do well to pay attention.

Author   

Daniel Heath Justice
Cherokee Nation citizen, Professor of Critical Indigenous Studies and English, University of British Columbia
Disclosure statement

Daniel Heath Justice has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Lawrence of Arabia at 60: a dazzling spectacle with complexity under the sand

David Lean’s epic is still an astonishing visual achievement but there are far richer and darker themes at play

Peter O’Toole in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. Photograph: Columbia/Allstar

Guy Lodge

Mon 12 Dec 2022 

Growing up in the 90s as a young child who was really into film, I was told two things about Lawrence of Arabia by my elders, usually in tandem. First, that it was A Truly Great Film, indisputably so, even among the Greatest Ever Made. And second, that despite its urgent and inarguable Greatness, I wasn’t to rush to see it – not until I had an opportunity to do so in a cinema. It wasn’t even worth watching on a television screen, they said, for that would cut its brilliance in half, or worse: like having your first glass of champagne and mixing it with water.

And so I waited. In Johannesburg, where I lived, there was no such thing as repertory cinema: my first experience of seeing a “classic” on the big screen was a 20th-anniversary re-release of Grease. Eventually, my patience ran out: when I noticed a late-night airing of David Lean’s horizon-wide historical drama on the TV schedule, I junked the advice I had hitherto been given, and stayed up to watch it on our boxy 14in Sony. I have no doubt that it was unfortunately cropped, letterboxing rarely being the favoured broadcast option in that dinkier age of television sets. But I don’t really remember, largely because, with all those caveats and warnings in mind, I was enthralled by the film anyway.

Lean’s near-four-hour biopic of writer, explorer and army officer TE Lawrence is a grandiose spectacle, sure: just hearing the title triggers a slideshow of sprawling, heat-hazed desert panoramas in one’s mind’s eye, a mental needle-drop of Maurice Jarre’s swelling, ceremonial theme, and that might apply whether you’ve seen the whole film or not. In the 60 years since it was released, Lawrence of Arabia has become a byword for the brand of epic studio cinema that “they” don’t make any more, or at least don’t make quite like that. In multiple senses, that aspect of the film is diminished by a small screen. Those who advised me to wait weren’t just idly gatekeeping; they simply remembered the overwhelming experience of watching a film so vast their gaze almost couldn’t reach the corners of the screen.

That emphasis on its spectacular qualities, however, tends to make people misremember (or at least, remember less) what an elegant, literate feat of historical portraiture Lawrence of Arabia is – how ambiguously textured and sometimes intriguingly amoral it is as a Great Man biopic that plays fast and loose with facts, and more importantly still, how sinuous and alluring Peter O’Toole makes it as a human character study. The image I hold closest from Lean’s film isn’t, in fact, any sandy Middle Eastern vista, nor even the celebrated “match trick” cut that vaulted editor Anne V Coates to legend status in her profession – it’s O’Toole’s impossibly scalpel-cut face, blue eyes burning with cool arrogance and wilder curiosity, jaw set with the confidence of both an instant matinee idol and, in the film’s world, a western warrior, floating a few inches above the ground he strides with an outsider’s entitlement. That visage suffered less on a grainy TV screen; Lean finds as much beauty in closeup as he does in widescreen.

Noel Coward, memorably, was sufficiently enamoured of O’Toole’s presence to quip:, “If you’d been any prettier, it would have been Florence of Arabia.” (The 6ft 2in actor certainly cut a more statuesque figure than the man he played.) Coward, more than most, likely picked up on Lean and screenwriter Robert Bolt’s tacit queering of Lawrence: if the man’s widely assumed homosexuality rarely makes it directly into the text (save for military superiors dismissively referring to him as a “creature” who needs to be “made a man”), it glimmers through O’Toole’s often deliciously louche performance, and his comfortable, close-quarters body language with Omar Sharif’s Sherif Ali – a composite of various real-life Arab leaders, gradually seduced by Lawrence’s brazen, rebellious military guidance, and seducing the white man in turn.

If the film’s geopolitics are more vocally articulated than its sexual ones, however, they’re often just as hard to read. On the face of it, Lawrence of Arabia presents as the kind of white-saviour epic that was prevalent in its era, making a colonialist hero of Lawrence as he emboldens his Arab comrades in their first world war revolt against the Ottoman Empire. As it plays, however, the film seems subtly sceptical of its golden-boy subject, presenting him as both icon and egotist: his recklessness in wartime is both sexy and selfish, his fascination with the Arab people indicative of both an open-minded, anti-colonial streak and an eminently English fetish for the exotic. When I revisited the film – at long last, on a suitably large screen – I was struck perhaps more powerfully by its 50-shades-of-tan desert-mirage beauty, but not at the expense of its tart, conflicted historical revisionism.

Is Lawrence of Arabia one of the great last hurrahs of a British heritage cinema still in thrall to its own cultural roots – so confident of its place in the world as to cast white Englishmen in brownface in key MENA roles – or does it point the way to a more questioning view of macho military history? The film’s masculine romanticism, not to mention the sheer darn size of the thing, leads us to believe the former, which is perhaps why its Great Film stock has fallen slightly in recent, more politically conscientious times: early this month, many were shocked to see Lawrence of Arabia tumble out of the top 100 in Sight & Sound magazine’s decennial critics’ poll of the all-time greatest films. (The film-makers in the parallel directors’ poll kept it in: Lean’s craft still inspires awe in his artistic descendants.)

On its 60th anniversary, however, its time to take a closer look at this still-extraordinary film, with all its ornate fabrications and flavourful biographical details, its rousing imperatives and mixed signals. For too long, perhaps, Lawrence of Arabia’s much-hyped big-screen dazzle invited us to marvel at it rather than look into it – but it’s a richer film still when you see the trees for the forest, the grains for the dunes.  

Canada needs to act on its existing defence policy, not review it repeatedly

THE CONVERSATION
Published: December 1, 2022 

In its budget in March 2022, the federal government announced a review of Canada’s 2017 defence policy, entitled “Strong, Secure, Engaged.” The government claimed this was necessary because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the “changed global environment.”

However, the fundamental problem with Canada’s national defence effort doesn’t call for yet another defence policy review — the fourth one in 17 years. There are no shortages of national security threat assessments, policies to respond to them and even financial resources to support the military.

The real challenges lie in the failure to execute the existing policy.

“Strong, Secure, Engaged” provided an analysis of the international environment that put an emphasis on the re-emergence of “great power competition” and in particular Russian and Chinese territorial ambitions. This is obviously more relevant today given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s increased aggression towards its neighbours.

Read more: Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan causes an ongoing Chinese tantrum in the Taiwan Strait

It also committed significant financial resources to the Department of National Defence, boosting the defence budget by $553 billion over the next 20 years. While still well below NATO’s two per cent of gross domestic product defence spending target, this is nonetheless a high water mark for Canada’s defence funding this century.

The policy also pledged to deliver major equipment acquisitions to the Canadian Armed Forces.

And finally, it provided for a force size of 71,500 regulars — also a peak this century.

Harjit Sajjan, defence minister at the time, speaks about the Strong, Secure, Engaged policy at CFB Trenton in Trenton, Ont., in June 2017.

 THE CANADIAN PRESS/Lars Hagberg

Failure to execute — and spend

The issue is less about “Strong, Secure, Engaged” becoming stale, and more about the failure to execute its lofty commitments and ambitions.

A focus on implementing these commitments will significantly improve Canada’s national defence output to better meet today’s security challenges.

Start with the money.

For a decade, prior to and through the early years of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, the Department of National Defence was, for some reason, incapable of spending the funds Parliament approved for it. Total unspent funds over this time frame amounted to at least $7 billion.

This problem continues. Last year, the Defence Department failed to spend more than $1 billion of its appropriation. Meanwhile, the Canadian Armed Forces continue to cry poor while significant funding budgeted for them is left on the table.

The story of the dysfunctional defence procurement system seems almost farcical.

It can take decades in Canada to purchase and acquire most major pieces of military equipment. Yet, Ottawa has done nothing to come to grips with the nuts and bolts of defence procurement reform. Commitments to buy new equipment aren’t worth much if your approach to buying is fundamentally broken.

Canadian troops are seen during a change of command parade on Parliament Hill in August 2019. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

Getting the numbers up

In recent months, Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre has issued dire warnings about the crisis of recruitment and retention in the Canadian Armed Forces. He said recently:

“We need to rebuild the Armed Forces, we need to get the numbers back up … and we’ve got to do it with a sense of urgency and priority because it is affecting our ability to respond around the world.”

The current numbers of “trained effective” regulars are just over 53,000, nearly 20,000 below the government’s target and the lowest in modern Canadian history.

Wayne Eyre takes part in an interview with The Canadian Press at Defence Headquarters in Ottawa in October 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

Yet it seems to have escaped the military leadership that a big part of the challenge with recruitment and retention is likely owing to the reputational hit the forces have taken in the past few years over allegations of sexual misconduct among numerous members of its leadership.

This culminated with the conviction earlier this year of Gen. Jonathan Vance, Eyre’s predecessor, for obstruction of justice in a sexual misconduct investigation.

Canada’s national defence leadership team needs to ask itself a basic question: What woman or man born this century — the age demographic the Canadian Armed Forces relies upon for recruitment — wants to work for an institution whose leadership is known chiefly for their archaic approach to women?
Arbour report

The problem of sexual misconduct in the military led the federal government to appoint former Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour to study the culture of an institution that sustains such behaviour.

Louise Arbour releases the final report of her review into sexual misconduct and sexual harassment in the military in May 2022. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

Arbour issued her report in May, at which time Defence Minister Anita Anand said the government would move quickly on its 48 recommendations. Seven months later there has been little action on most of Arbour’s recommendations.

These problems — financial, procurement, human resources and culture — do not require another voluble defence policy review to resolve. They do require hard work and tough decisions — in other words, execution — rather than more words on a page.

Author 

Eugene Lang
Assistant Professor (Continuing Adjunct), School of Policy Studies, Queen's University, Ontario
Disclosure statement

Eugene Lang consults for the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI). The opinions expressed in this article are his own and do not represent the views of CADSI

Are conspiracy theorists true believers, or are they just acting out fantasies?

A man holding a Q sign waits in line to enter a Donald Trump rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., in 2018. 

THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP, Matt Rourke

THE CONVERSATION
Published: December 8, 2022 

Democrats are killing and eating children. Vaccines contain Satan’s DNA. Canada has a new queen who is really an extraterrestrial with special powers.

Read more: How the self-proclaimed 'Queen of Canada' is causing true harm to her subjects

It’s difficult for many people to understand how anyone could believe such wild conspiracy theories.

But in my view as a philosopher who studies the imagination, the key to understanding online conspiracy theorists is to understand how the line between fantasy and reality can become blurred.

Belief or fantasy?

Evidence suggests that many people don’t fully believe the wild conspiracy theories they seem to embrace. That explains why, when pressed, conspiracists often stop short of saying a theory is true. Instead, they say they’re “just asking questions” or that the theory could be true.

Why spend so much time engaging with a theory you don’t really believe? Why spend hours watching conspiracist YouTube videos, reading conspiracist blogs and posting on conspiracist message boards? We can better understand these behaviours if we adopt the hypothesis that many conspiracists are merely pretending and acting out fantasies.

Some support for this hypothesis comes from the fact that engagement with conspiracy theories is largely driven by how entertaining they are, not by how much evidence supports them. Online conspiracist communities are also full of self-proclaimed “live-action role players” who treat conspiracy theorizing as one big game of pretend.

It’s easy to see why wild conspiracy theories vividly capture people’s imaginations. They make for good stories, with plots that resemble political thrillers.

It’s also fun to imagine that you’re special because you know things that few others do (just imagine overhearing a juicy secret or piece of gossip). Since many conspiracy theorists have strong desires to be special or unique, they’d be attracted to fantasizing about having secret knowledge that’s been hidden from the general public.
From fantasy to belief

Of course, it would be hasty to claim that this applies to all conspiracy theorists.
In this 2016 photo, flowers and notes are shown outside a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant where a man fired an assault rifle multiple times over Pizzagate. (AP Photo/Jessica Gresko)

Some people carry out extreme actions in the name of conspiracy theories. This has included opening fire in a family restaurant while investigating the baseless so-called Pizzagate conspiracy, as well as attempting to arrest cops at the order of Canada’s “queen.” We don’t usually do such dangerous, reckless things during games of pretend.

Perhaps we can then better understand how people come to believe such theories by considering how fantasy and reality can become confused.

Usually, we don’t allow our fantasies and games of pretend to influence what we believe. But we also often use our imaginations to form new beliefs about the world: you can imagine what your own future will be like, or you might imagine the exterior of your house when trying to figure out how many windows it has.

Because what we imagine can feed into what we believe, there’s always a risk that we accidentally allow our fantasies to infect our beliefs.

Read more: Conspiracy theories are dangerous even if they don’t affect behaviour

For various reasons, conspiracy theorists are especially likely to make this sort of mistake.

For one thing, people are more likely to mistake fantasy for reality when they imagine vividly or in great detail. And groups of people imagining things together create especially vivid and detailed imaginings.

Since conspiracy theories are often invented by groups of people communally constructing a narrative, we should expect their imaginings to be vivid and detailed

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Infowars founder Alex Jones appears in court during a Sandy Hook defamation trial in Connecticut in September 2022. Jones spread false conspiracy theories about the 2012 school massacre. 

(Tyler Sizemore/Hearst Connecticut Media via AP, Pool)

Conspiracy theorists also lack markers that ordinarily help us keep track of what’s real and what’s pretend. Consider an actor on stage or children having a pretend tea party. In those cases, the line between fiction and reality is clearly marked in the behaviours of everyone involved.

The actor can see the audience watching her and stops pretending once she leaves the stage. The children can see that their guests are dolls, and they refrain from taking real sips from their toy teacups.
No markers

Online conspiracy spaces lack such markers. Social media puts people under pressure to constantly like, share and retweet the most juicy and outrageous content, meaning users on conspiracy platforms are constantly under pressure to act as if they believe far-fetched theories.

Social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok and Twitter have been a breeding ground for conspiracy theories. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

People also probably endorse conspiracy theories in part to signal their political loyalties, which adds additional pressure not to reveal when one is faking it. When participating in online conspiracy communities, people are also surrounded by others under these same pressures.

So, conspiracy theorists don’t see many obvious markers of the fact that they’re merely acting out fantasies, neither in their own behaviours nor in the behaviours of those around them. This makes it easier to lose sight of what’s real and what’s pretend.

The imagination can be a tool for fantasizing and exploring fictional worlds. It can also be a tool for learning new things about reality.

When we let these uses get mixed up, we risk allowing fantasies to influence our beliefs. This seems to be the mistake made by many conspiracy theorists, who become so absorbed by their imaginations that they lose track of the line between fantasy and reality.

Author 

Daniel Munro
Postdoctoral Fellow, Philosophy, University of Toronto
Disclosure statement
Daniel Munro receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Ada Lovelace’s skills with language, music and needlepoint contributed to her pioneering work in computing


Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was more than just another mathematician.

THE CONVERSATION

Published: December 8, 2022 

Ada Lovelace, known as the first computer programmer, was born on Dec. 10, 1815, more than a century before digital electronic computers were developed.

Lovelace has been hailed as a model for girls in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). A dozen biographies for young audiences were published for the 200th anniversary of her birth in 2015. And in 2018, The New York Times added hers as one of the first “missing obituaries” of women at the rise of the #MeToo movement.

But Lovelace – properly Ada King, Countess of Lovelace after her marriage – drew on many different fields for her innovative work, including languages, music and needlecraft, in addition to mathematical logic. Recognizing that her well-rounded education enabled her to accomplish work that was well ahead of her time, she can be a model for all students, not just girls.

Lovelace was the daughter of the scandal-ridden romantic poet George Gordon Byron, aka Lord Byron, and his highly educated and strictly religious wife Anne Isabella Noel Byron, known as Lady Byron. Lovelace’s parents separated shortly after her birth. At a time when women were not allowed to own property and had few legal rights, her mother managed to secure custody of her daughter.

Growing up in a privileged aristocratic family, Lovelace was educated by home tutors, as was common for girls like her. She received lessons in French and Italian, music and in suitable handicrafts such as embroidery. Less common for a girl in her time, she also studied math. Lovelace continued to work with math tutors into her adult life, and she eventually corresponded with mathematician and logician Augustus De Morgan at London University about symbolic logic.

A rare photograph of Ada Lovelace.

Daguerreotype by Antoine Claudet via Wikimedia

Lovelace’s algorithm

Lovelace drew on all of these lessons when she wrote her computer program – in reality, it was a set of instructions for a mechanical calculator that had been built only in parts.

The computer in question was the Analytical Engine designed by mathematician, philosopher and inventor Charles Babbage. Lovelace had met Babbage when she was introduced to London society. The two related to each other over their shared love for mathematics and fascination for mechanical calculation. By the early 1840s, Babbage had won and lost government funding for a mathematical calculator, fallen out with the skilled craftsman building the precision parts for his machine, and was close to giving up on his project. At this point, Lovelace stepped in as an advocate.

To make Babbage’s calculator known to a British audience, Lovelace proposed to translate into English an article that described the Analytical Engine. The article was written in French by the Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea and published in a Swiss journal. Scholars believe that Babbage encouraged her to add notes of her own.

Ada Lovelace envisioned in the early 19th century the possibilities of computing.

In her notes, which ended up twice as long as the original article, Lovelace drew on different areas of her education. Lovelace began by describing how to code instructions onto cards with punched holes, like those used for the Jacquard weaving loom, a device patented in 1804 that used punch cards to automate weaving patterns in fabric.

Having learned embroidery herself, Lovelace was familiar with the repetitive patterns used for handicrafts. Similarly repetitive steps were needed for mathematical calculations. To avoid duplicating cards for repetitive steps, Lovelace used loops, nested loops and conditional testing in her program instructions.

The notes included instructions on how to calculate Bernoulli numbers, which Lovelace knew from her training to be important in the study of mathematics. Her program showed that the Analytical Engine was capable of performing original calculations that had not yet been performed manually. At the same time, Lovelace noted that the machine could only follow instructions and not “originate anything.”
Ada Lovelace created this chart for the individual program steps to calculate Bernoulli numbers. Courtesy of Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology, CC BY-ND

Finally, Lovelace recognized that the numbers manipulated by the Analytical Engine could be seen as other types of symbols, such as musical notes. An accomplished singer and pianist, Lovelace was familiar with musical notation symbols representing aspects of musical performance such as pitch and duration, and she had manipulated logical symbols in her correspondence with De Morgan. It was not a large step for her to realize that the Analytical Engine could process symbols — not just crunch numbers — and even compose music.

A well-rounded thinker

Inventing computer programming was not the first time Lovelace brought her knowledge from different areas to bear on a new subject. For example, as a young girl, she was fascinated with flying machines. Bringing together biology, mechanics and poetry, she asked her mother for anatomical books to study the function of bird wings. She built and experimented with wings, and in her letters, she metaphorically expressed her longing for her mother in the language of flying.

Despite her talents in logic and math, Lovelace didn’t pursue a scientific career. She was independently wealthy and never earned money from her scientific pursuits. This was common, however, at a time when freedom – including financial independence – was equated with the capability to impartially conduct scientific experiments. In addition, Lovelace devoted just over a year to her only publication, the translation of and notes on Menabrea’s paper about the Analytical Engine. Otherwise, in her life cut short by cancer at age 37, she vacillated between math, music, her mother’s demands, care for her own three children, and eventually a passion for gambling. Lovelace thus may not be an obvious model as a female scientist for girls today.

However, I find Lovelace’s way of drawing on her well-rounded education to solve difficult problems inspirational. True, she lived in an age before scientific specialization. Even Babbage was a polymath who worked in mathematical calculation and mechanical innovation. He also published a treatise on industrial manufacturing and another on religious questions of creationism.

But Lovelace applied knowledge from what we today think of as disparate fields in the sciences, arts and the humanities. A well-rounded thinker, she created solutions that were well ahead of her time.

 Watercolor portrait of Ada King, Countess of Lovelace by Alfred Edward Chalon 

Author

Corinna Schlombs
Associate Professor of History, Rochester Institute of Technology